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Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future
By looking backward at the course of great extinctions, a paleontologist sees what the future holds.
More than 200 million years ago, a cataclysmic event known as the Permian extinction destroyed more than 90 percent of all species and nearly 97 percent of all living things. Its origins have long been a puzzle for paleontologists. During the 1990s and the early part of this...more
More than 200 million years ago, a cataclysmic event known as the Permian extinction destroyed more than 90 percent of all species and nearly 97 percent of all living things. Its origins have long been a puzzle for paleontologists. During the 1990s and the early part of this...more
Hardcover, 256 pages
Published
April 17th 2007
by Smithsonian
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So far, the purple tint of the prose is getting in the way of some interesting geological and paleontological sleuthing (and scientific paradigm politicking). It's like someone told this guy he was a *really good writer*, and he took it to mean that tortured sentences and irrelevant references to cultural icons actually add value. (As if i could cast stones - but then, i'm not writing books.)
One of those people who are in an abusive relationship with language, even though (or because) they love...more
One of those people who are in an abusive relationship with language, even though (or because) they love...more
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Interesting exploration of the confluence of climate change and extinction from archeological and climate science study perspectives.
Even though many think that asteroids are the cause of extinction, the current research shows that 12 of the 14 major identified extinction events were connected to climate change events.
"The carbon dioxide makes pretty clear that times of high carbon dioxide - and especially times when carbon dioxide levels rapidly rose - coincided with the mass extinctions. Here...more
Even though many think that asteroids are the cause of extinction, the current research shows that 12 of the 14 major identified extinction events were connected to climate change events.
"The carbon dioxide makes pretty clear that times of high carbon dioxide - and especially times when carbon dioxide levels rapidly rose - coincided with the mass extinctions. Here...more
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What's the worst-case scenario that could happen in the future because of global warming? This book will tell you. Paleontologist, Peter D. Ward, has spent his entire academic career studying the effects of past climates on the earth's many life forms, and, in my opinion, he speaks with great authority when projecting these findings into the future.
Written almost like a detective novel, Ward leads you through the latest scientific discoveries about past climates and the mechanisms that produced...more
Written almost like a detective novel, Ward leads you through the latest scientific discoveries about past climates and the mechanisms that produced...more
This is the second book by Peter Ward I've read. I was hoping that it would deal more with some of his work on the Permian-Triassic boundary. Rather, it spent a great deal on the over covered K-T boundary, a brief heavily abbreviated discussion on the PETM, and then ended the book with a rant on the coming apocalyptic future as CO2 increases. Thus only the middle chapters discussed the Permian-Triassic boundary and then mostly why it is not an asteroid impact event. His primary literature on the...more
I liked this book. The theory of mass extinctions could have just been presented at the outset, probably in a paragraph or a chapter, but Ward tells it as a story of the search for truth, so we get both the science angle and the politics of science angle. It's a good book to read if you're interested in global warming, mass extinctions, and how science works.
I found his discussion of the politics and personal interactions surrounding the impact hypothesis for the dinosaurs' extinction intriguin...more
I found his discussion of the politics and personal interactions surrounding the impact hypothesis for the dinosaurs' extinction intriguin...more
A clear and carefully researched examination of the past and the possible future of climate and life on our planet. Conditions on Earth have been far weirder at times than I had realized, and probably will be again in the distant future, i.e. tens or hundreds of thousands of years. In the meantime, it's most likely that the next few decades will be harrowing due to the multiple impacts of global warming, as also explained by Al Gore among others - more and more violent storms like Katrina; risin...more
Peter Ward has been studying mass extinctions for many years, and now turns his attention to what might happen this time. Will we end up with Canfield oceans and a poisonous green sky? My take is this: if there is the slightest possibility of the scenario Ward posits - one that has happened several times in geological hisotry - happening, we need to do everything and anything to stop it.
This was a real eye opener of a book for me. I'm not a scientist and was grateful that Ward could explain recently discovered research about the past to a layman. He's gathered together evidence from a variety of disciplines (paleontology, climatology, volcanology) and written a fascinating and frightening book about a possible and near future awaiting our planet.
mid way thru:
Not sure about this yet...packed with interesting information, but writing style is a a bit convoluted.
Upon finishing:
Through the first half of the book, I was going to give this 3 stars. It provides an interesting window into the development of scientific theories and their subsequent acceptance/rejection, and the stuff about paleontology is utterly fascinating. But the author seems to have a bit of chip on his shoulder, and continually throws in odd personal details that feel a bi...more
Not sure about this yet...packed with interesting information, but writing style is a a bit convoluted.
Upon finishing:
Through the first half of the book, I was going to give this 3 stars. It provides an interesting window into the development of scientific theories and their subsequent acceptance/rejection, and the stuff about paleontology is utterly fascinating. But the author seems to have a bit of chip on his shoulder, and continually throws in odd personal details that feel a bi...more
Ward leads you on a trail through his geological life experiences to expose and answer mystery by mystery ultimately explaining the rationale behind the book's title. Through scientific evidence he paints the most convincing, frightening and yet strangely hopeful picture of life and death on this changing planet.
Excellent Doomer reading! ;) The science behind the discoveries of past mass extinctions really fascinated me. I do wish the last half of the book, about what is coming, had been longer and more drawn out... it's really a short book for all the things it says.
This is a great book. We can tell a lot about the future by what has happened in the past. I suspect from earding this book that we are headed towards anoxic and maybe even Canfield oceans. This is not likely to happen in our lifetimes or the lifetmes of even our children or grandchildren but it will change the Earth for a long period of time.
That the largest mass extinctions in Earth's long history were caused by global warming. The End-Cretaceous Event, associated with a huge impact even, may be an exception, but even that event might have involved global warming as vegetation died out because of dark skies, then caught fire and burned from lightning strikes afterward, generating vast amounts of CO2. The frightening thing is that such events also entail Canfield oceans, large shallow seas devoid of oxygen, filled with methanogenic...more
Scary, well-researched book by a well-qualified scientist. He researches periods of mass extinctions of animals and plants in Earth's past. His conclusions are that we are heading directly into another such period---global warming, ice caps melting, fresh water pumping into the ocean, end of deep ocean currents--result: most of Earth becomes a tropical hell-hole with an ugly green sky due to a yellow dust haze throughout the atmosphere.
This book sounds very reasonable and is written in a much m...more
This book sounds very reasonable and is written in a much m...more
Jun 24, 2011
Marts (Thinker)
marked it as sounds-interesting
Shelves:
science,
geography-environment-development
Paleontological views on mass extinctions as such relates to the issue of global warming and the earth's climatic future...
Okay, this just furthers my feelings my belief that the ocean is just spooky.
This is a chilling account of the processes that can be set in motion by global warming. He talks about the possibility of states of the earth, which probably existed before and are likely to exist again, that would drastically change the conditions for life on earth. Although periodic upheavals in the chemical properties of atmosphere which drive enormous physical changes are probably inevitable, I came away from this book with the feeling that we are foolish to hasten such changes.
It was definitely a bit of an eye-opener. Global warming is MUCH more complicated than we laypeople have so far allowed it to be. Ward's prose tends toward the purple MUCH more than it needs to, but neither that nor the tons of scientific facts inside bog down the message. Overall, a very interesting read. Ward successfully explains what will happen to the Earth if we don't work now to fix global warming.
There's a lot of good science in this book about past extinction events and their relationship to current global warming. It's an easy read, but the author's style is sometimes irritating in the extreme. He loves to construct these tortuous sentences that ramble through several peripheral reflections before getting to the point. I suppose it's intended to show what a broad thinker he is, but it mostly just makes me wish he'd get to the point. Nevertheless, worth reading.
Another good book from Dr. Ward. As usual, a bit cocky, but informative and enjoyable. Not sure I can buy his theory that people in hot humid climates use drugs to cope with the weather (and that most good thinking is done in "sweater weather" (ie cool weather). None the less, a good book on global warming.
Frightening, a bit technical, but I have nonetheless passed it along to several friends who have been glad to read it. If you want to know more about the history of the earth, and what can actually happen (and HAS happened) when the climate of our planet changes, read this book.
The author builds a very interesting case for where Planet Earth may be headed if we don't seriously address anthropogenic green house gas emmissions. Good reading for anyone who appreciates how scientists work to give us a better understanding of the world.
Pretty good account of past mass extinctions as they are revealed in the geological record. The author provides some nice first-hand accounts of field expeditions across the globe but his writing style is a bit annoying.
The science is heavy handed, but informative. Ward does a good job of building up to the argument for how humans are impacting/accelerating climate change. It is frightening.
Sep 27, 2007
Mindy
marked it as to-read
Recommended from a really rich resource on the environment and sustainability -- worldchanging.com.
Oct 01, 2011
Tampines House
added it
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This book should be required reading for every person on planet Earth.
Frightening.
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Professor at the University of Washington
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